A small business SEO guide to getting discovered online

Sixty-one percent of consumers use search engines and other online resources to discover local businesses, according to a consumer survey by BrightLocal. So ensuring your business comes up in Bing or Google search results can be the difference between potential customers coming to you or going to one of your competitors.

Local search is such an important way to reach new customers that no small business owner can afford to ignore it. But with so many different ranking factors affecting your business’s place in the search results, learning about search engine optimization (SEO) for the first time can be intimidating.

Many small business SEO guides add to the intimidation by implying that you need to execute every detail of SEO perfectly to see positive results. You don’t. Even very busy small business owners—especially those with limited time to work on their online presence and limited funds to hire an outside SEO service—can improve their business’s search engine rankings.

Learn the basics of small business SEO, and discover an SEO strategy that will help you gradually improve your rankings—even if you only tackle one small task at a time.

How does SEO work?

When people type a search term into Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, or another search engine, the platform uses an algorithm to pull up relevant content. It displays that content on search engine results pages, or SERPs. The content that shows up on the first SERP—or the first page of the search results—will usually get the most clicks, bringing in the organic traffic.

Search engine algorithms crawl the internet, analyzing the information on different webpages to determine what it’s about and how high quality it is. The algorithms then match the webpage to search terms and rank the page against similar pages. The goal of the algorithm is to show the most relevant and highest-quality content at the top of the search results—with less relevant or lower quality content appearing further down.

With some search terms, the algorithm is good at knowing what the searcher wants to see, and it will pull up very specific search results. For example, if you type “best Thai food near me” into a search engine, you’ll see Thai restaurant listings and review pages from sites like Yelp.

With other search terms, the algorithm isn’t as certain about what the searcher wants to see, so it will pull up a wide variety of search results. If you type “bathroom tile” into a search engine, it will pull up everything from e-commerce sites that sell tile or local business listings to blogs about buying tile and redecorating a bathroom.

Ranking factors

While the exact formula that search engines use to rank content is a closely guarded secret, there is an understanding of many of the ranking factors. Search engine algorithms look for relevant keywords and phrases, prioritize in-depth content over cursory content, and like webpages that contain relevant images.

It’s also known that user experience is important to a website’s search engine rankings. So algorithms consider things like your website’s page speed (or how fast your webpages load), accessibility, and navigability. If people click the link to your website and then quickly return to the SERP because they didn’t find the content they were looking for or didn’t enjoy their user experience, it can hurt your search engine rankings.

And if people type in a broad search term, like “bathroom tile,” and decide the results aren’t what they wanted, they’ll return to the search bar and type in a different search term, like “what is the most durable type of bathroom tile?” This will affect the type of results search engines show for the original search terms as the algorithm attempts to learn what searchers want to see.

While you can’t control every aspect of searchers’ behavior, you can influence your business’s ranking by optimizing your online presence for the ranking factors that search engine algorithms care about. Those ranking factors fall into three categories.

What are the 3 categories of SEO?

The three categories of SEO are on-page SEO, technical SEO, and off-page SEO. Websites that address all three of these areas will rank the highest. While the first two categories pertain to your business website, the third category relates to your broader online presence.

Let’s take a closer look at each area.

On-page SEO

Your on-page SEO is everything that appears on your business website. This includes your written content, like the text on your home page, product or service pages, and blog posts. It also includes any images, videos, or multimedia content you have on your site as well as your navigation menu, header, and footer.

Technical SEO

Beyond what appears on your webpages, there are also elements of your business website that visitors can’t see but that nonetheless affect their user experience. This includes how long it takes for your website to load, how easy it is for them to navigate from one page to the other, and whether or not they can access your site from their mobile phone.

Search engine algorithms also use elements of the back end of your website to get important information. Title tags and headings tell algorithms what a webpage is about. Meta descriptions provide a high-level summary of information on the page, and alt text describes the images on your site.

But you don’t need to be a web developer to get your technical SEO right. Many website templates come pre-optimized for SEO, so all you have to do is add headings, meta descriptions, and alt text in plain English (not HTML) when you upload new content.

Off-page SEO

Your off-page SEO is all of the information about your company that appears online in a place that isn’t your business website. This includes your social media accounts, listings in business directories, profiles on online business platforms like Yelp, and even citations on other people’s websites, on local influencers’ blogs, in news stories, in customer reviews, and so on.

Your off-page SEO helps legitimize your website, and by extension your business. When your business appears in more than one place online (ideally with a link back to your website from all or most places), it signals to algorithms that you run a reputable business and that your website is the primary source of information about your business.

What is local SEO?

Local SEO involves optimizing your website so that it comes up in the search results when people in your service area look for businesses or services like yours. Local SEO is important for any business whose target audience is limited to local customers. If your small business serves a national audience (maybe you provide digital services or have an e-commerce store), then you won’t need to optimize for local search.

But let’s say you run a hair salon in Wichita, Kansas. You’ll want your business to come up when people in Wichita search for “haircut,” “hair dye appointments,” “blowout near me,” or any other term related to the services you offer.

It won’t help you attract new customers or turn your website traffic into conversions if your salon appears in the search results for a customer who lives in California. It would also be a waste of your online marketing resources to target such a wide audience. (And it tends to be more difficult to rank in national search results than in local search results.)

The key to local SEO is to include your business address or service area in as many locations as possible. List it on every page of your website by adding it to your site’s header or footer. You can also create a location page on your website to add more details, like directions from the nearest highway or major intersection. Include your address in all of your other online accounts, like your social media profiles and directory listings, as well.

Make sure to set up your Bing and Google business profiles using Google My Business and Bing for Business. This not only gives you one more place to list your address, it also allows you to appear in the the Local Pack—the part of the search results that shows a Google Map with local businesses on it—which means customers can discover your business in search results even if they don’t visit your business website.

A basic small-business SEO strategy

Below, you’ll find an effective SEO strategy that you can use to start ranking in search results and to bring more organic search traffic to your business. These SEO tips are broken down based on which area of SEO they support—on-page, technical, or off-page.

While it might seem like a lot to do, you’ll gradually start to see results even if you’re only able to tackle one small task at a time. With SEO, a little can go a long way. Many of these best practices also help your broader online marketing efforts. They align with social media marketing and content marketing strategies and help build brand awareness.

Your on-page SEO strategy

These tips will help you get your website content into shape so your site can start to rank. Here’s what to include on the pages of your website.

Business information

The most important information to include on your website is your business name, address, phone number, and other contact information. You should include these details on every page of your website by placing it in the header and footer. Again, small businesses that serve a national or international audience won’t need to include their address, but all of your other business information will still be essential.

Your business information should be exactly the same everywhere that it appears online, so make sure you’re consistent with your company’s name, logo, and other details.

You can also add a location page and a “contact us” page to make the information easier to find and add more pages to your website. Websites with more pages are seen favorably by search engine algorithms because they’re providing more information to their website visitors.

Keyword research

Before you start creating more pages on your website, it helps to know what information people are searching for. This allows you to create content that directly addresses people’s search queries, which will help you rank higher for those keywords.

Free keyword research tools, like Moz or Google Search Console, are good places to start your keyword research and are a great fit for businesses with a limited budget.

Type keywords related to your products or services into the keyword planner, and it will show you similar keywords. You can see how many people search for each keyword per month and choose specific keywords that are related to your business.

Let’s go back to that hair salon in Wichita, Kansas. When you enter “Hair Salon Wichita” into the keyword planner, it suggests related keywords like:

• Hair extensions Wichita
• Balayage Wichita
• Cheap haircuts Wichita
• Curly hair salon Wichita
• Haircut Wichita
• Brazilian blowout Wichita

If this were your business, you could use these suggested keywords as topics to create landing pages to explain each service you offer. For example, you might add a page explaining your hair extension services and another explaining your balayage services.

But you’ll only want to target keywords that are relevant to your business. So let’s say that this hair salon is a high-end salon. You would want to ignore the suggestion for “cheap haircuts Wichita” since this doesn’t apply to your offerings.

Content creation

Once you’ve chosen the keywords you want to target, you’ll create content that discusses those keywords in detail. Creating a separate landing page about each of the products or services you offer will show your expertise and help you rank for related keywords.

You can also make your content more competitive by including internal links—or links to other pages on your website. For example, your home page might describe each of your services in just a few sentences and then link to the landing page that describes it in more detail.

If some of your landing pages are related to each other, you can link to one landing page from another. That hair salon might create a landing page for hair dying that links to other landing pages for balayage, ombre, and low lights. Ideally, you want your internal pages to be hyperlinked from text that’s related to the page’s target keyword. So the link to a landing page about balayage would appear over the word “balayage.”

For many businesses, especially local businesses, a website with landing pages for each of your services may be all the content you need to rank. But if you’re trying to reach a national audience or you’re in an extremely competitive industry, you may need to create additional content.

Blog posts, videos, podcasts, and ebooks can all help you target more keywords and expand your reach. This type of content is especially good for addressing long-tail keywords, or more specific phrases that contain three or more words.

For example, the hair salon might create a landing page to address the keyword “balayage,” and then add a blog that addresses the long-tail keyword “how long does balayage last.” This would give them more content that shows search engine algorithms that they are an expert in this service.

If you find that you need more content to improve your search engine rankings, try to publish on a consistent schedule. It can be three times a week or once a month—whatever your schedule allows for. Consistency shows search engine algorithms that you are actively creating content, which helps your webpages rank higher.

Your technical SEO strategy

If you don’t have experience with web development, then one of the best and easiest ways to address the technical side of your website’s SEO is to choose a website template that’s already SEO optimized when you build your site. If you do, then many of these tasks will already be done for you.

Mobile optimization

Research by Sistrix found that 64% of search is done on mobile devices. So you need a responsive website—one that automatically transitions from a desktop layout to a mobile layout, depending on the user’s device—to rank in search results.

Choosing a responsive website template will ensure that this feature is already built in.

Site security

Hackers often target websites, infecting them with viruses or replacing your website’s pages with their own fraudulent ones. If your website gets hacked, it’s detrimental to the safety of your website visitors and ruins their user experience. Even just one or two instances of hacking can cause your site to drop dramatically in search engine rankings.

You can protect your website by adding a security plug-in. Your website hosting platform may also offer security features, often for an upgraded price. Most website security services charge a small fee, but it’s a good investment to keep your site safe.

Site speed

Your website’s page speed—or how long it takes for a webpage to load—has a dramatic impact on user experience. Many visitors will return to the SERP if your site takes too long to load. The number of visitors who click on your website and leave without taking an action is called your bounce rate, and a high bounce rate is bad for your SEO ranking.

There are three main ways to improve your page speed:

1. Check your website for viruses that might be hurting its speed.
2. Reduce the amount of data on your webpages by compressing large files, like images and videos.
3. Upgrade your web hosting plan. It’s possible your hosting plan doesn’t provide enough bandwidth to keep up with the size of your site or the number of visitors you get.

Schema markup

Schema markup is structured data that appears in the backend of your website and tells search engines about the type of information included on your pages. The type of schema markup that you should include varies by industry. But again, if you choose an SEO-optimized website template, then the schema markup should already be incorporated.

Make sure the template you choose is specific to the type of website you want to build. For example, a business website template will have different schema markup from an e-commerce website.

Look for templates and plug-ins that specifically state that they include schema markup and are SEO-optimized. Adding an SEO plug-in to your website can ensure you have the right schema markup on each of your pages, and it can suggest site and content improvements to help your SEO ranking.

Your off-page SEO strategy

Your off-page SEO is important for increasing your online visibility. It helps potential customers find your business in other locations online, like through social media. It also helps reinforce your business information with search engines, which can improve your ranking. Here’s how to optimize your off-page presence.

Social media accounts

Create social media accounts on all the platforms that make sense for you and your target audience. Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are good starting places.

On each of your social media accounts, include your business information in the exact same way you included it on your website. Make sure to link back to your business website from your social media profiles. This creates a backlink—a place on the internet that links to your website. Backlinks legitimize your company’s website, which helps it rank higher.

Once you have your social media pages set up, post regularly. It doesn’t have to be every day. It can be as little as once per month if that’s what fits your schedule. As long as you’re posting on a regular schedule, it will show search engine algorithms that your accounts and business are still active.

Business listings

You can broaden your online presence even more by adding your company to directories, like Google My Business, and to online business platforms, like Yelp. When you claim your Yelp Business Page, you create another backlink to your website, and you’re able to start collecting and responding to online reviews, which also help your off-page SEO. Remember to fill out all of your business information and ensure it matches the details on your website.

Online reviews

Customer reviews often contain relevant keywords that help your business rank for different products and services. For example, if a customer went to a hair salon, they might leave a review that says, “I have curly hair, and my stylist did a great job!” This review could help the salon rank for a keyword like “curly hair salon.”

Beyond their contribution to your SEO, these reviews are important for building relationships with potential customers, so they help your broader online marketing efforts.

Other backlinks

You can also partner with local influencers, interview with your local newspaper, host local events that get advertised on event websites, and more to expand your online presence. Each of these efforts could contribute another backlink to your website, which will expand your overall link-building efforts and give your website more authority.

Monitoring your SEO strategy

Once you’ve implemented these SEO tactics, you can track your business’s performance through Google Analytics. When you connect Google Analytics to your website, it will show your key metrics like your page speed and the amount of organic traffic your site is bringing in.

As you check off each of the SEO tips above, you should see your business’s traffic start to increase. If at any point your traffic stagnates or starts to drop again, you can go back through the tips above, add more content, and continue to optimize your online presence.

Make your small business searchable

Small business SEO is an important tool for attracting new customers to your business. While SEO takes time, small business owners can tackle most tasks on their own.

Every little bit helps, so even if you can’t create a perfectly optimized online presence overnight, you’ll be able to gradually improve your SEO rankings and reach more and more potential customers.

SEO brings you people who are already looking for products and services like yours, which makes it easier to turn potential customers into paying customers. Discover more ways to connect with people who are looking for products and services with these nine strategies for inbound lead generation.